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The war of words between President Vaclav Klaus and Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek over the latter's proposal to compensate Sudeten German antifascists has reached a new high. On Thursday President Klaus said that Mr Paroubek "must have taken leave of his senses". The president was reacting to PM Paroubek's statement that he had probably misunderstood the essence of the reconciliation gesture and that by having rejected it President Klaus has got into one group together with the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft in Austria.

This Sunday, people will jump into rivers all over Europe to reclaim their environment and demonstrate their wish to have clean and living rivers again. But how clean are Czech rivers? Ten years ago, no Czech would have dreamed of swimming in the rivers, mainly polluted by industrial waste.

Almost sixteen years after the fall of communism the Czech Republic has still not resolved the much-debated issue of controlled rents - a legacy of the state-controlled economy which is distorting prices on the housing market. The government has finally decided to address this sensitive issue and approved a bill proposing an average 9-percent increase of controlled rents over the next six years.

The Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek's plan for a reconciliation gesture towards Sudeten Germans who were expelled from the country after WWII despite the fact that they had actively opposed the Nazi regime has run into serious problems. Even before the prime minister had time to specify what kind of conciliatory gesture he had in mind, the opposition parties and president Klaus slammed the idea as "totally irresponsible and potentially dangerous". In addition to that the Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda has now made it clear that his country

After the rejection of the European constitution by the public in France and the Netherlands the last EU summit criticized the general lack of information on European issues in most of the EU member states. In response to that criticism, the Czech government has now decided to change the framework of its planned EU informational campaign. Instead of focusing solely on the EU Constitution, it aims for a broader scope, explaining how the European Union works and how the Czech Republic may benefit from EU membership. Martin Mikule called Petra Masinova

Over the last decade the Czech Republic has had a thriving film industry, with dozens of foreign film companies shooting in the country every year. But a new trend has seen production companies looking further east, to countries like Hungary and Romania, which unlike the Czech Republic, offer attractive tax incentives to visiting film makers. But how long will the Czechs be able to compete?

Postdemocracy is a term that was used by President Vaclav Klaus at a Council of Europe meeting in Warsaw in May where he criticised growing power of non-governmental organizations. But President Klaus's criticism of civil society has outraged many members of different voluntary associations, who have protested against his attack. President Vaclav Klaus says his words were misunderstood and, on Tuesday together with the right-wing think tank the Centre for Economics and Politics, he held a panel debate to help clarify this dispute.

Sculptor Jan Rericha is a man obsessed with marble. Although marble serves well for statues and palaces - Rericha uses it to create the most unexpected artefacts - a violin made of marble now has pride of place at the City of Prague Museum.

Almost sixteen years after the fall of communism, many people, including historians, still find it hard to get access to the files of the StB, the former communist secret police. A group of senators are now proposing that a special Institute of National Memory should be established to gather all the documents in one place, and provide researchers and the general public easier access to the files.

The expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II remains a live issue, with calls from Sudeten Germans for the return of their property regularly dismissed by Czech politicians; they say the expulsions were legal and demands for compensation have no validity. But now the Czech prime minister, Jiri Paroubek, is planning to make a gesture towards the Sudeten Germans - or at least the minority who actively resisted the Nazis.